


as in a mirror, dimly

by leoperidot



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: (somewhat), Angst, Canonical Character Death, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pre-Relationship, Wu-centric, i futzed with canon but i wouldn't call it canon divergence, just... canon expansion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-18
Updated: 2021-03-18
Packaged: 2021-03-27 15:14:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30124728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leoperidot/pseuds/leoperidot
Summary: The thing was, Wu was never supposed to be on the throne.or, a small peek into how Prince Wu stumbled his way into being King Wu.
Relationships: Mako/Prince Wu (Avatar), Wu & his family
Comments: 8
Kudos: 30
Collections: MMEU Spring Equinox Exchange 2021





	as in a mirror, dimly

**Author's Note:**

  * For [eastaustraliancurrent](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eastaustraliancurrent/gifts).



> for east! you asked for wu angst and i hope i delivered!

The thing was, Wu was never supposed to be on the throne.

First in line had been Hou-Ting’s son, of course, who’d been the Crown Prince since he’d been born. From what Wu remembers of him (not much), he was a distant presence, seemingly always studying for a test (that, of course, would never come). He took a wife—as all princes did—and with her, he had two heirs, five and three years older than Wu. While Wu lived in a peripheral house in the royal complex in Ba Sing Se, not with the main line, when he did come to the main palace, the differences in their stations and Wu’s could not have been clearer. He may as well have been a peasant child tracking mud on the heirloom Gaoling carpets for the contempt in their eyes when they looked at him. They were quieter, and more poised; less clumsy, more royal.

If all those relatives had been unable to take the throne, it should have passed to Wu’s grandfather, the Queen’s younger brother. Then Wu’s uncle. Then Wu’s cousins, three of them, ranging from two years older to four years younger than Wu, who had been his ostensible playmates growing up, though they’d found him rather annoying. Then Wu’s mother. 

Then Wu.

Tenth in line.

“It would take something pretty disastrous for me to end up king,” Wu had joked, once, during his first year of university in Republic City, to a girl he’d been trying to impress. When that had passed for funny.

Mere months later, Wu’s bodyguard—the one before Mako, a big, quiet man named Yang with a black scruff of beard and stony black eyes, who, like any servant Wu had known growing up, would practically fall over himself at Wu’s any whim—he’d rushed into Wu’s bedroom and muscled him out the door, wordless, even to all of Wu’s questions, and, together with a cadre of Republic City police, shoved him into an unmarked car and drove off at a speed he was certain couldn’t be legal.

“Is this a kidnapping?” Wu had joked.

Yang said nothing. Neither did the other bodyguard, the woman who usually worked nights, Shu Fen, who was driving. Wu never had more than one bodyguard on him at once.

“A coup, maybe,” Wu tried again.

Yang exhaled hard and said, “Your Highness, please be quiet.”

Tough crowd.

A few miles from his university apartment and thousands of miles from the palace, in some obscure but quiet and obviously wealthy part of Republic City, Wu was then rushed out of the car and ushered into a nondescript apartment building and then down a flight of featureless grey stairs—somehow at once the most claustrophobic and the most echoey stairwell he’d ever been on—and into a basement flat.

It wasn’t awful, Wu thought. Not like the horrors he’d been picturing.

There were no windows. 

Yang and Shu Fen were preoccupied with an intricate system of locks on the two nested doors.

“This is the safe room Her Majesty ordered the construction of, when you moved to Republic City,” said Yang, once they were sufficiently and completely trapped inside. “It’s the most secure place for you in the city right now.” And then, for a moment, he raised his eyebrows, opened his mouth, like he could have amended that statement.

He chose not to.

Wu perched gingerly on a couch and attempted to breathe.

So Her Majesty had ordered the construction of this little flat. His great-aunt. How noble of her, to deign to consider his safety. (Wu’s chest was tightening uncomfortably.) She did not look favorably on Wu’s grandfather, for allowing his daughter such an undesirable match, nor on Wu’s mother, for wanting it, and least of all on Wu’s father, for being it.

(Maybe it would have been fine, had he ended up pale like his mother, or with her delicate, flat nose, or anything other than the spitting image of his father. But he didn’t.)

“So even the tenth in line gets a safe room,” he said. It didn’t sound like a joke. He didn’t know if he’d meant it as one. He didn’t know much of anything, except that his heart was beating too fast, except that something had to be very, very wrong. “Very . . . cushy.”

Yang and Shu Fen were silent.

“Okay,” said Wu, to no one.

*

After a few very quiet hours, a decision, apparently, was reached. Yang sat down in the armchair across from where Wu was lounging on the couch and said, “Your Highness.”

“Yes,” Wu said. He was flicking through a fashion magazine, which was the only personal belonging he’d managed to bring from his apartment. Apparently, President Raiko’s wife had committed a severe faux pas in her outfit for a ceremony in honor of United Republic veterans. 

“Your Highness,” Yang started again, his voice very purposefully delicate, “there’s been an assassination at the palace in Ba Sing Se. Her Majesty The Queen is dead.”

All the air left the room at once.

The magazine slipped out of Wu’s hands, and then he was sitting up, and he was grasping at his hair— “My—my mother—” 

“Her Highness and your father are unaccounted for.” Yang’s voice, already brusque by nature, now was hard, flat, like the edge of a knife. “So is His Highness her brother and his wife and children. We don’t know where they are. They may have escaped.”

“And—” Wu couldn’t breathe. “The others?” His grandmother, his second cousin, the direct line— 

“No one else survived.”

_No._

Yang and Shu Fen had seen Wu falling-down drunk or sobbing, heartbroken, at one of many rejections, or in the rare moments Wu let his facade of confidence slip. 

Nothing quite like this.

Nothing even approaching— 

Wu felt—something in his chest, something pressing hard against his heart, squeezing on his lungs— _something_ next to emotion or halfway there, and he pointed at a door near the kitchen and said, “Bathroom?”

Yang nodded.

So Wu locked himself in there and—

And he should have cried.

He caught sight of his face in the mirror. 

Tired. Was how he looked.

Deep shadows threatened under his eyes; his mouth was set in a flat, hard line. A crease had appeared between his eyebrows, he’d been furrowing them without realizing. He looked tired, and worn, and wan. And like his father.

His father, who was unaccounted for. His mother, who was unaccounted for. His uncle and cousins, unaccounted for. 

And Wu’s grandfather and Wu’s second cousin the Crown Prince and his wife and two sons, two sons hardly older than Wu, and Wu’s great-aunt the Queen—dead, dead, dead, dead, dead. 

How had they done it? All at once, in a blaze of glory? Or perhaps the assassins went methodically, one by one, room to room, slitting each throat. Were his family members cut down quickly, as an unfortunate line of soldiers, or did they take their royal time to die? Did they get a look at their killers? Did they know the light was leaving them, and how could they _stand_ it, how could it feel to know— 

Wu rushed to the toilet and vomited.

Then he cried.

*

Hours dragged on listlessly, lifelessly, the passage of days marked only by the newspapers sneaked in from RC police officers stationed outside the building. Wu scoured them, devoured them, desperate for any fragmented, processed, vague, repackaged information.

 **EARTH QUEEN HOU-TING ASSASSINATED** , said the first day’s papers. 

“Well, I knew that,” said Wu, holding up the paper so his bodyguard could see it. Yang did not laugh.

The next day’s: **RIOTS ROCK BA SING SE**. Smaller headlines, lower down: **Airbending Earth Kingdom Citizens Still Stranded** ; **Avatar Korra’s Location Unknown** ; **_Royal Obituaries: Page 2_**.

He turned to page two. No mention of his parents.

There was a sharp pinch of pain in his finger—when he looked, he saw he’d bitten the nail down to the quick, and then some.

A photograph of his second cousins stared at him from page two, their very green eyes bleached to pale grey by the flash, the younger one reproachful and the older judgmental from beyond the grave.

With a cry of frustration, he tore the newspaper in half, crumpled it up, and pitched it across the room.

Shu Fen leveled a disapproving glance at him. 

He felt his eyes well up and then he was crying, sobbing noisily, like a child, like the precise opposite of proper royal comportment, but he couldn’t stop—

Shu Fen looked on, impassively.

“How can you just stand there?” The words tore through him with violence—he was off the couch and shouting before he even realized what he was doing. “How dare you? Your sovereign was _murdered_ —How _dare_ you—They’re gone, they’re all gone, and you’re just here, just standing there like—like that, and I can’t—I don’t—How _could_ you? They’re all—” His voice shattered precipitously, and he dissolved back into sobs.

Shu Fen’s face was still quite as emotionless. He’d shouted himself hoarse and she hadn’t once even broken her stance.

“Forgive me, Your Highness,” she said, flatly. “I am merely doing what I can to ensure the future king doesn’t meet the same fate.”

Her words hit Wu like a knife.

He staggered backwards until his knees hit the couch, and then collapsed with a distinct finality. 

“No,” he stammered, his mind not fully there. “I’m not—My—My uncle, my cousins, my mother, they’re still . . . They’re ahead of me. They have to . . .”

“Your Highness—”

“No,” he insisted. “No! You—You stop that, that’s treason. That’s _treasonous_!”

Shu Fen shut her mouth.

Wu did too.

Silence.

*

 ** _AVATAR KORRA SAVES AIRBENDERS_** was splashed triumphantly across the front page the next morning.

There was nothing on the front page about the royals, so Wu busied himself with the article that detailed Avatar Korra’s feats of courage and tenacity in the face of an evil opponent looking to decimate the entire fledgling Air Nation.

Not only had she fought the bad guy, but apparently, she had a posse of friends who’d fought by her side; Wu found himself reading and rereading a paragraph about Mako, a lightning-bending detective from the Republic City Police force. And, maybe, staring at his picture. He was handsome in a brooding way. Like something out of a spy novel.

When going over that one passage finally lost its appeal, Wu started flicking through the rest of the paper. The economy, apparently, was going down. Spirit vines were a nuisance. President Raiko’s approval ratings were rising.

His eyes wandered to the fourth page and he lost his breath.

 ** _Royals Found Dead Outside Ba Sing Se_**.

Accompanied by photos of his uncle, aunt, and cousins.

They were gone.

*

He locked himself in the bathroom. Didn’t even cry, just sort of stared at the wall.

Was he an awful person—utterly morally bereft, bankrupt, cruel—if seeing those faces that were not his parents had given him the slightest moment of joy?

*

And then, that night, without any fanfare, it was over.

“The perpetrators,” Shu Fen said, “have been neutralized.”

Which was ominous phrasing. But Wu was just happy enough to be out of the basement prison, away from Yang and Shu Fen, and back in his student apartment that he couldn’t bring himself to consider who these perpetrators were or how they’d been neutralized.

Yang did not drive him to the university neighborhood.

Yang parked the car outside a huge, many-storied hotel in the heart of the city, all lit up against the dark of the night. 

“More secure than your old place,” Shu Fen said.

“It’s only temporary,” Yang said.

And then Wu was alone.

*

Wu fired Yang and Shu Fen the next day.

He felt at least a little bit of remorse, when he saw their faces fall in disappointment. They were good people. He just couldn’t stand the sight of them any longer.

“You’ll need someone besides my officers to guard you,” said Lin Beifong, when he met with her regarding his security, as, given the state of his home, he would need to remain in Republic City for some time. “Your Highness,” she added belatedly.

Wu bristled. “I’m sure I can manage,” he said, in his best impression of self-effacement. “Some of the personnel from Ba Sing Se are coming, are they not?” Not that he wanted any of them to be his personal bodyguards, but she didn’t need to know that.

Beifong hmphed and said no more.

“I did have a request,” Wu tried. “If you would be so kind as to offer one of your officers to my security team . . .”

Beifong crossed her arms, leaned back in her chair. “Who were you thinking, Your Highness?” When it came out of her mouth this time, it sounded like an insult.

“Your detective,” said Wu simply. “Mako.”

*

**three years later**

As it turned out, politics was difficult, running a country even more so, and abdicating the throne and dismantling a millennia-old monarchy wasn’t nearly as simply as merely willing it so, even if you were the king.

“I mean, what’s the point of absolute power,” Wu had joked to Mako, after one particularly frustrating day of his advisors arguing over pointless minutiae, “if I can’t even quit my job in peace?”

Once he figured out that he wouldn’t just become a normal citizen within a few days, he proposed a trip throughout the newly-reunited territory of the Earth Kingdom. And surprisingly, though his advisors agreed on nothing, they agreed on that. (The specifics of the trip, of course, were a different story. Everything had to be argued over: the route, the stops, the events, the size of the security detail he was to take with him. On that last point, Wu was thankfully able to negotiate down to just Mako and two other security guards who’d keep their distance. He couldn’t imagine having to schlep around with the sort of security forces his great-aunt would have insisted on, if she were taking this trip. Not that she ever would have deigned to do so.) 

In any case, they had ended up by now in the southeastern province that Wu knew was home to his father’s family. The province was large and diverse, and many of the people looked like Wu’s father, spoke the common tongue with a cadence like his. Wu had never visited—he’d scarcely even left the Upper Ring of Ba Sing Se before going to the University of Republic City—and, being here, he had the overwhelming sense that he should have felt more at home.

It was at a ribbon-cutting ceremony—the sixth or seventh Wu had been to on this tour—for some kind of cultural museum in some unremarkable town Wu could hardly remember the name of. He was giving some mundane speech an advisor had thrust into his hand not five minutes ago, some haughty prose about treasuring the diverse cultural heritage of their lands, when he looked out on the crowd.

A man had slipped in the back of the audience, and Wu lost his breath and his place in the speech.

The man’s hair was greyer than it had been three years before. His shoulders were slightly more slouched, his clothes slightly less fine.

For Wu, he was like looking in a mirror about thirty years on.

Rattled, Wu stumbled his way through the rest of the speech, and then shook hands with the various dignitaries who had come, their effusive praise bouncing, unheard, off his ears.

When Jiahao, one of Wu’s other security guards, started shooing the dignitaries away, one lingered. Wu took a deep breath and faced him.

“Father.”

His father bowed low to the ground. “Your Majesty.”

Okay, that was a deeply uncomfortable feeling. “Please—um. Rise.”

And his father did, and then they were standing face to face.

Silence.

“Father,” Wu said, again, stupidly. “You’re here.”

“Wu,” his father replied, an uncertain smile taking up residence on his face. 

Silence.

“Your speech was—excellent,” said his father. “Very . . . very well-delivered.”

“Thank you.” Wu had never been an outstanding orator, no matter how many palace tutors attempted to teach him.

Silence yet again. 

What was he supposed to say? Wu’s brain seemed to be racing a mile a minute and producing exactly zero coherent thought, except that his father was _alive_ , and here, in front of him, and smiling as though no time at all had passed.

“When I heard you were coming,” he said, “I . . . I had to . . .”

Wu nodded, barely processing the words. “Is Mother—” He cut himself off, unsure where the question was going. Unsure if he wanted the answer.

“She’s at the house.”

All his breath escaped him. “Oh.”

She was alive, too.

“I—I’m sure she’d be happy to see you,” said his father hastily. “If you want. If you can. I—”

“Yes,” Wu said, without so much as a glance at Jiahao or Mako or his fussy, self-important advisor, who’d surely remind him of his tight schedule, his commitments, his duties. “Please.”

Nothing could be so important.

His father bowed his head. “I would be honored.”

*

His father wasn’t a tall man, but he was taller than Wu—most were—and, just as Wu remembered, he had a quick stride that left Wu struggling to keep up. (It was a scene, he thought bitterly, reminiscent of so many from his childhood.)

A fearful unease was mounting, somewhere in the neighborhood of Wu’s stomach, as he followed his father through the dusty streets, past the edge of town. He shouldn’t be uneasy. A miracle had happened. His father was alive, his _mother_ was alive, and they were right here, hiding in plain sight. He should have been overjoyed. 

As the town fell away behind them, the path grew steeper, and a beautiful mansion with white stucco walls seemed to rise out of the ground.

It was a grand estate, comparatively—nothing, of course, matching the opulence and luxury of the palace compound in Ba Sing Se, but very clearly several cuts above the majority of the town. Its luxury, Wu thought, was almost certainly financed by his father’s family’s wealth; whatever his great-aunt’s hang-ups about Wu’s father marrying into the royal line, it couldn’t be denied that his family was perfectly respectable minor provincial nobility.

The guards swept open the gates for Wu’s father. 

The whole place was all white walls and brown tile roofs, like many of the buildings down the hill, but it had a self-conscious grandeur that reminded Wu of Ba Sing Se.

Wordlessly—he was always a man of few words, always telling Wu that actions spoke louder—Wu’s father led him into the main room, and— 

There she was.

Wu’s mother was the same as ever, but for the emergence of a grey streak or two emanating from her temple, softening the jet black of her hair. She still held her delicate frame as tall and regally, her face as inscrutable, as though she were holding royal court in Ba Sing Se.

“Your Majesty,” she said, bowing low to the ground.

“Oh—” Discomfort, more intense and acute than he’d felt yet this visit, twisted his gut. “Please—Please don’t—”

She did, with a grace Wu could never have hoped to achieve. “My son,” she said, then, and floated across the room to him. She moved with none of the hurried, desperate passion a peasant woman may have had, in reunion with a son she hadn’t seen in years—her steps were delicate, careful, calculated, emotionless.

“Oh, my darling,” she murmured, taking him in her arms. 

He was taller, now, than her. He’d grown so in his sixteenth or seventeenth year, not long before he left Ba Sing Se. She rested her head on his shoulder; she smelled of a jasmine perfume Wu didn’t recognize.

When they pulled apart, she took his face and held it in two smooth, soft hands. “Where have you been all this time,” she asked, “my dear, dear boy?”

Wu’s throat closed up.

She knew the answer to that. She had to. She had to know where he’d been, what he’d been doing, unless she hadn’t seen a newspaper in three years. 

(She knew he was king now. She’d bowed to him with the respect reserved for a sovereign. She knew her son was king, when she should have been queen.)

“Republic City,” Wu choked out weakly. His heart ached with plaintive, childish reproach. “I’ve been in Republic City, Mother.” He’d lived for three years in the Presidential Suite in a hotel in Republic City, and here his parents were, the whole time.

His mother tsked, a short, disapproving sound.

“And you—” His voice teetered on the edge of breaking, and he cleared his throat against the growing lump there, not that it helped at all—“You’ve been here.”

Her exquisitely-manicured eyebrows furrowed in something approaching concern. “Oh,” she murmured. She was still holding him. Her hands were cold. “Oh, my son, we only did what we had to do,” she said. “It was so dangerous, escaping Ba Sing Se—and your father, his only thought was to come here, so we’d be safe from all that, and we couldn’t—we had to lie so low, for so long—”

Wu shook his head. He couldn’t bear it anymore, couldn’t keep listening to her litany of excuses.

Three years.

He extracted himself very carefully from her arms, utterly at a loss for what he was supposed to say.

His mother sighed. “Let’s talk,” she said. “You could stay for dinner.”

Wu’s heart leapt in surprise. “Are your cooks here as good as the ones in the palace?” he attempted to joke.

She gave an indulgent little smile, and he felt like a little boy again, glowing with his mother’s smallest gestures of love. “You could see for yourself.”

He glanced back, towards Mako, who was lurking in the doorway as he always was. _Could I?_ he wordlessly asked, with a tilt of his head. The scheduled dinner that night was with some bigwig of manufacturing, maybe. Wu couldn’t remember; in any case, they could surely wait.

Mako raised his eyebrows, as if to say, _up to you._

His mother’s face was still expectant; his father joined at her side, interlacing his fingers with hers in a display of affection his great-aunt would have scoffed at. Didn’t befit a royal. It was peasant behavior, to love like that.

“I, uh . . .” Guilt was crawling its thin, cold fingers up his throat. “I—I’m abdicating the throne,” he said, a complete non-sequitur. 

His mother’s eyebrows shot up practically to her hairline. “But who—”

“We’re . . . we’re abolishing the monarchy. We’re developing a democracy. I . . . I won’t be king. Sometime.” He didn’t know why he was saying it, but as soon as he’d started, the words didn’t stop. “I can come back,” he said, helplessly. Like it was what they wanted to hear. Like it was what he wanted to do. “But, just . . . not now. Not yet. I have work to do.” He had work to do. He was the sovereign leader of a nation; he couldn’t step away. Couldn’t abandon his people. 

His mother’s face moved almost imperceptibly through several expressions Wu couldn’t quite parse before landing on something properly royal, and numb.

“Your Majesty,” she said, lowering her head.

“Your Majesty,” his father echoed, lowering his.

“Um.” Wu’s stomach was twisting, ill at ease. “Uh . . . Thank you.” It wasn’t the right thing to say. He didn’t know at all what he was supposed to say—as a king or as a son.

He turned around quickly, before either of them had the chance to look up, and fled the room in a decidedly un-kingly manner.

As soon as he was out of that half-grand house, blinking in the bright sun, he collapsed on Mako’s side.

“That was _awful,_ ” he lamented into Mako’s black shirt.

Mako chuckled, just a little bit, and patted Wu on the shoulder. “You did well.”

Wu groaned, standing upright. There was something much more turbulent inside him, something he couldn’t quite name to complain about, something he didn’t know how to address.

“Let’s get back,” Mako said. “Jiahao’s probably wondering where we are.”

They walked in silence for a bit; the sun was slowly sinking lower in the sky.

“Was it so strange?” Wu found himself asking without really meaning to. 

Silence.

“You know, when you found your family?” he added, hastily.

“Uh.” Mako looked down at his feet. “I mean, yeah. Pretty strange. But I’d never, uh . . .” He cleared his throat. “Never met them before.”

“Oh,” Wu said.

“Yeah,” Mako said.

They were quiet, for a while. Wu gazed down the hill, towards the town center, staring at nothing, least of all Mako.

“They’ve been here the whole time,” he burst out. “The whole time, I was in Republic City, and they knew that, and they never—” He cut himself off quickly, voice breaking.

“I’m sorry,” Mako said. 

Wu swallowed hard. He wouldn’t let himself cry. It was ridiculous to cry. His parents were alive, and safe, and happy, and wasn’t that all he had wanted, for three years on end? Hadn’t he lain awake at night longing for them, hoping he’d see them again, praying they’d somehow, anyhow have survived? 

But he’d pictured—

“Why didn’t _they_ come to _me_?” he asked, desperately, despondently, and then, he couldn’t help it, he buried his face in his hands and wept.

He’d wanted them to turn up in Republic City. He’d pictured them stepping off a train, like peasants, like anyone, and then they’d comb the city for him, checking each neighborhood, every building, until they made it to him, and then—

And then his mother would hold him. And say how scared she’d been. And he’d say he survived. And his father would hold him, too.

Wu felt a hand on his shoulder, and then, wordlessly, Mako hugged him.

It was awkward. Bony. They didn’t quite fit together, Mako’s gangly arms around Wu’s slouchy frame, but Wu melted into his touch anyway. He was warm, and even though the day was balmy, the little extra heat was comforting.

After a moment, he said, “Okay.” He patted Mako’s chest with one hand, brushing away his tears with the other. “Get off me, big guy.”

Mako obliged, but a tiny frown pulled at his stiff features. 

“I know,” Wu said hastily, mashing the heel of his hand into his eyes and trying desperately to affect an air of mocking self-deprecation. “I know, silly, royal, rich boy problems. I don’t know what I have to be crying about—”

“It’s not silly.”

Wu looked up in surprise. 

Mako’s frown had deepened. “You’re not being silly,” he repeated.

“Oh,” replied Wu, feeling distinctly idiotic. “Well.” He fished in his pocket for his green silk handkerchief to blow his nose. “Thanks.”

“I mean it,” Mako insisted. “I’d tell you if you were, right?”

Wu’s mouth twisted into an involuntary wry smile. “I guess you would.”

“I would,” Mako confirmed. “Okay? So don’t . . . Just don’t.”

Wu blew his nose again, very loudly. “Fine.”

Mako patted him on the back. “I know what’ll make you feel better,” he offered, a little grin tugging at the corners of his lips. 

“Oh yeah?” Wu had finally just barely managed to stem his tears; he crumpled his handkerchief back into his pocket. “What?”

“I noticed a smoothie place in town,” Mako said. “Shall we?”

Wu smiled despite himself. “We shall.”

*


End file.
